


the property

by Askance



Series: Terrible Things [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Harm to Children, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 20:58:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5758639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Children are vicious, and violence blooms like bruises in Wyoming. Dean gets it, he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the property

 

“Aw, hell, Sammy.”

 

In a wind this cold and dry Dean knows his lips will be bleeding and his face will be raw soon.

 

Sam's hands are shoved deep in his coat pockets, his shoulders hunched up around his ears. His nose is running and his boots are wet, right jean leg caked in mud up to the ankle, a scrape below his eye.

 

Dean sniffs, feels the harsh ice of the air in his nose. Looks down into the ditch between the tips of their boots. There's a body down there, a boy with an obliterated skull, and the blood soaking into the dry dead ditch-grass is the same blood drying on the front of Sam's corduroy jacket.

 

He looks up, squints through the wind at his brother.

 

“Didn't mean to,” says Sam, with a tremor.

* * *

 

In northern Wyoming there is a whole lot of nothing in every direction. In October the sky is grey and clouds skid over the plateaus and the mountains as if they have somewhere to be, somewhere less barren and unsettling. And Wyoming is, more than anything else, unsettling, and Dean thinks the moment he sets foot in it that the earth breathes here somehow, her heaving bones lifting up out of the ground, cracking the dry soil into massive pieces, and he's glad they're not spending _too_ long here. A month, maybe two, while Dad finishes something up on the border with Bobby. Long enough to enroll Sam in the eighth grade but not long enough to worry about report cards. Long enough to rent out the sagging weather-busted trailer a mile outside town in the middle of a waning corn field—not long enough to really let the cold set in, to creep through the drafty windows and up through the warped plywood floor. Over it the sky is a huge and oppressive dome and the stars wheel in circles, when they can be seen.

 

In northern Wyoming Sam comes home to the trailer with a bleeding nose on a Wednesday night and Dean sits by the light of the camp lantern to dab the blood away and show Sam where to pinch it. The next morning he's got bruises flowering in his eye sockets and stays home from school, and Dean doesn't ask. Violence is just a thing that happens to them, like food stamps, like cigarettes. Most of the time there's no point in pursuing it. It blooms and blows away like weeds and dry corn husks, especially here, with the plains so flat, and all the valleys where it gets caught on the sage and the branches.

 

He sends Sam walking the mile and a half to school the next morning in the early frost with butterfly bandages on the bridge of his nose, and when Sam comes back he arrives in a gust of freezing air and a tornado of rage, slamming cabinets and swearing under his breath. Dean sits in the armchair by the door and waits for him to say something, but he won't. 

 

Someone's picking fights with him at school; that much Dean can figure out himself. Doesn't take a genius to figure out why. It's practically a ritual at this point. In places like this, where everyone exists in a bitterness not unlike that of the winter hills and canyons around them, it's inevitable. Sam, in his too-small jacket and his too-big hand-me-down boots and his haphazard haircut given in dim light over a motel sink—practically a dartboard. 

 

He puts himself in Sam's space; if he wants help dealing with the bully, he's there to be asked. But Sam's at that age where he fits into a place like Wyoming, a place that's icy and dry and unreal. He doesn't ask for help.

* * *

 

He doesn't ask for help until a week before they're set to leave this place, head north towards Sioux Falls to spend the winter with Bobby, and South Dakota's not much of a friendlier place, but at least there are friends in it. Thursday, three-forty PM, Sam comes into the trailer and stands in the doorway of the bedroom where Dean is lying, reading, silhouetted in his jacket in the bright winter light, and doesn't say anything. 

 

Dean glances at him sideways, a sharp black shape.

 

“Hey,” he says.

 

Sam doesn't move. “Dean?”

 

“Mm.” He turns back to his book, some L'Amour shit, not even worth reading, really. Yellow pages that smell like glue. Found it under the armchair cushion, waterstained.

 

“Come out here a sec?”

 

“Out where?”

 

“Out,” says Sam, with an edge in his voice. Dean looks at him full-on this time.

 

“What's the matter?” he says.

 

Sam goes out of the trailer, leaves the screen door open behind him.

 

It takes Dean a little while of fumbling in the dark bedroom for his coat. He's pulling on gloves and looks down at the floor where Sam had stood in the shear of light from the door. There's a reddish smudge, the shape of a boot tread.

 

“Shit,” he swears, and follows him out.

* * *

 

“He followed me from school,” Sam says, crouched on the edge of the ditch. Dean is down inside it, hunched over the body, grimacing. “He wouldn't let up.”

 

“Wouldn't let up what?”

 

“Talking shit. Shoving me around.” Sam looks south, along the dirt road that cuts through the field, towards the distant hunkering shapes of town. “Said we were white trash—”

 

“Where's the rock?”

 

“What?”

 

“The rock.” Dean scrapes his palm against his jeans even though there's nothing on his gloves. “The rock you used.”

 

“I don't know, I threw it off—” He points, back behind him, into the tall, rustling, heaving grass. “Somewhere—”

 

“Go find it.” Dean stands up, curling his lip. His boots are a millimeter from an unspooling of brain matter, a length like a dead earthworm. He hears Sam crunching away from him and looks up into the wind again.

 

The night is coming in from the east, unfurling against the brackish stormclouds lining the hills beyond town, and lights are going on across the main drag, winking like fireflies. The water tower is a high white spot proclaiming a name in black out into the distance, to no one. 

 

Someone will come looking for the kid soon. 

 

He should probably be angry, or at least upset. His heart is beating loud and reckless. But all he can think of right now is fixing this. And he will fix it, the way he fixes everything.

 

“I can't find it,” he hears Sam say, from above him. He looks up. The kid's blood is congealing on Sam's jacket in cold, viscous pearls. “I'm sorry, I looked—”

 

“It's okay. It's gonna rain.”

 

“It is?”

 

“Run back to the trailer, get the sheet off the bed.”

 

“What?”

 

“We have to move him.”

 

Sam knows the tone of his voice and doesn't ask again.

* * *

 

There's a shack on the property, a mile behind the trailer, sticking out like a black fingernail from the ground.

 

The kid is dead weight, and fat, and rolling him onto the blue fitted sheet from the bed is a struggle, and Dean thinks wryly of beached whales and frowns at the blood on his boots. Sam's breath is coming in clouds. When they turn the body over onto its back, Sam finally shows some sign of understanding as to what he's done—he sees the glassy brown eyes and Dean hears him swallow hard.

 

He bashed the kid's head in with a rock, he said. The rock he can't find, and Dean can only hope the freezing rain blasts the blood away. Didn't mean to—it just happened, he just lost it. Said the kid pushed him into the dirt and he scraped his cheek and his hand landed on a stone just the perfect size, indented, good for gripping.

 

Said the kid's skull kinda bent inward. Like a fist into drywall.

 

He pulls a corner of the sheet down over the bully's face and Sam seems to feel better; they twist the ends of the fabric in their hands and Sam stands on the ditch-top, pulling as hard as his little eighth-grade muscles can pull.

* * *

 

Heavy, heavy. It gets colder in cascades and thunder starts to growl over the mountains and they're only halfway to the shack that leans in the mud and the dead grass, singular and foreboding. The hill drops off above it and Dean knows from long chilly afternoons of wandering that from its door it is impossible to see the trailer, the town, anything. A clapboard stand at the center of nowhere, and good a place as any to hide a body.

 

The dirt road is out of sight when Sam trips over something and lands hard on his tailbone, and he sits there in the mud and starts to cry. 

 

“Dad's gonna kill me,” he says, and Dean remembers very abruptly that his brother is a kid, and he just murdered someone with a rock for calling him white trash, and by now the flashlights will be out in the fields looking for the boy, and they have to get rid of this body before the lights come their way. 

 

“Dad's not gonna know a damn thing about it,” Dean says, tramping in the slippery smear underfoot over the bulk of the corpse and crouching down, gripping Sam's jacket lapel to get him up. Sam's jeans are soaked and it's beginning to rain, spitting from way up, and if it gets much darker there's no way they'll find the shack.

 

“Come on,” he says, wiping Sam's wet hair out of his eyes. 

 

“I didn't mean to,” Sam says, hoarsely. Which is a lie, but a well-intentioned one, and there's no time to fault him for it—not that Dean would, because Dean understands, because Dean is horrified by how little this is horrifying him.

 

Violence. Sweeps in and out like a storm. Flowers like bruises in an eye socket. It's nature, like their bone marrow.

 

“We'll fix it. Okay? We'll fix it.” 

 

Sam is barely fourteen.

* * *

 

Something is dead inside the shack—maybe a rodent, a mass of black rot in a far corner, too decomposed to identify. Sam gags on the threshold and Dean holds his breath for fear of inhaling the flies that are swarming inside, in the relative warmth, the humidity of gases escaping the carcass. 

 

Perfect, in its way.

 

“Come on,” Dean says, “come on,” and Sam breathes through his mouth, gets another grip on the soaked, bloody sheet, and together they haul the body into the pitch-black shed, and Dean pushes it with the toe of his boot towards the back.

 

He can hear Sam's stomach heaving behind him. Rain on the roof, hard and sharp.

* * *

 

In the trailer they sit crammed together on the floor of the shower stall, because there's no point in wasting water on two runs, and Dean scrubs mud out of Sam's hair with his hands, picks flecks of dirt off his face. His corduroy jacket is being pummelled with hail in the rain barrel out back and his bloody jeans are in the trash. For a while they sit in the shower, Dean with his eyes closed, feeling small, glad that Sam's skin is smooth and nearby. 

 

“We're not gonna freak out,” he says, drying off in the mirror while Sam pulls on his boxers and a T-shirt, shivering in the cold. “We're not gonna tell Dad and we're not gonna skip town, 'cause you didn't do anything wrong, did you?”

 

“Dean—”

 

“You didn't do anything wrong.”

 

Sam gets it.

 

“Dean,” he says again, softer.

 

The power in the trailer goes out, very gently. Dean looks toward the door. 

 

“Hell.”

 

“That was bad,” Sam says. 

 

It isn't worth it to leave the bathroom, not in the dark, and in here it's humid and comfortable, and doesn't smell so much like death. Dean sits down on the linoleum floor with a sigh. Sam stands against the wall, still, and sometimes lightning illuminates his head.

 

“Yeah,” Dean says. “It was bad.”

 

Northern Wyoming is a whole lot of nothing in every direction, and Dean can almost feel the yawning space a few inches from his back, out there, black sea of grass and mud and, somewhere, a rock covered in blood, and fragments of skull in a ditch. 

 

“It's okay, Sammy,” he says, feeling very tired. His arms ache and he doesn't want to be here anymore. He wants to be putting this at his back, with Sam under his arm. “It's gonna be okay.”

 

Won't be the last time something like this happens. Not with someone as fire-boned as Sam. He can't bring himself to care about the body in the shed. Never knew it, after all. Trusts Sam's judgment. Trusts the swing of his arm and his anger. All that matters is fixing it, like a busted nose. 

 

When they head north this'll all blow away, and some mother somewhere will shed tears, in a year no one will remember their faces, let alone their names.

 

It's the existence they're of and in and from.

* * *

 

Sam's fourteen and Dad hasn't taken him hunting yet. Promised it'd be soon, once the summer rolls in, somewhere less pale and unreal. Twelve years from now when some hunter in some dive bar asks them over whiskey about their first kills, Dean will mention the shifter in the Dakotas and the silver-tipped arrows, and Sam will lie, and Dean won't say anything about it.

 

 


End file.
